Well, the Cardiac Kids were in full effect on Black Friday
this year. We saw the most inefficient performance by our offense in my memory
of the past 3 years in terms of turnover margin; -3 (our 5 to their 2). Even
though I was aware all season that USF has a defense that is more than meets
the eye, I too am guilty along with most of UCF Nation of sleeping on the bulls
in this game. Our offense looked sluggish off the bat but even when we managed
to put good drives together, sloppy play lead to the majority of our turnovers.
Joey Grant got forced back into Storm Johnson and accidentally punched the ball
free, free rushers forced Blake to throw an underthrown pass that ultimately
got picked off, a slightly overthrown ball tipped out of a receiver’s hand and
got picked off. All in all, we played a sloppy game. Our defense did its usual
bend but don’t break game, we effectively shut down the USF offense for the
entire first half, but as momentum swung in the favor of USF after multiple UCF
drives resulted in no scores or a turnover, the defense began to wear down and
allow USF to move the ball in the 2nd half, surrendering 200 of
their 280+ yards of total offense in the final 2 quarters. What I found to be
concerning was the amount of times USF’s QB found a man in 1v1 coverage deep,
sometimes behind the defender. We gave up a LOT of deep routes; they just never
took advantage of them. If their QB put a little less arm and a little more
touch on some of those deep passes, this score could’ve been a lot uglier in
USF’s favor. Neither offense nor defense played their best game against that
school to the west, but between the two the offense is looking like it has the
most to work on, particularly in operating against an aggressive pass rush and
taking better care of the ball. On defense, I’m hoping I am mistaken about what
I saw from our deep passes as we go into our final game against SMU and their
pass-heavy offense.
